What's Live and Loud! All About?

I've always enjoyed live bootlegs - unofficial recordings of bands in concert, right from when I started buying them on tapes in Camden Market in the 1980s. Fasting forwarding 30 years and the idea behind Live and Loud! was to take live concert recordings I could find, marry that with the recording software I use for my own music, in order to remaster these recordings, make them sound as good as possible and broadcast them. Then make them available for free. You do find people charging for live bootlegs still (and some still think because they bought it, it sounds better!), but there are many available now (unmastered/unrepaired, usually) for free on the internet if you know where to look - so why pay for them, other than to get a nice sleeve...

I should stress these are not available commercially - either from me or from the original artist - no money is made out of this at all. And if a gig IS released officially, then I don't do it. I've come across a couple of live recordings I wanted to remaster and broadcast, then found they were being released officially, so not bothered. And a couple of shows I've done have subsequently been remastered professionally and released officially - so the links are removed from the page for those gigs.

Almost every show I do is what are called either "soundboard" recordings - taken directly from the mixing desk used at the gig on the night, or FM radio recordings - somewhere the gig was broadcast on local or national radio. A few gigs, if they are of special historical importance, make an appearance even if they were recorded from the audience. Depending how bad it is, I can fix tape hiss, noise, tape drop out, clicks, speed variations - and that's before EQing the sound to bring out the instruments as well as possible.  Depending on the quality of the original recording, these can sometimes be made to sound almost like commercial recordings. The few audience recordings still sound much better than when I originally got them - even if they're not exactly "hi-fi" (ok ok , showing my age right there, I know).

Each show take several hours or even several days to put together - but if you love music, and especially live music, like I do, then its worth it. I have many shows in my collection but I'm always still searching for live recordings always - especially from before the 90s - I haven't done yet.

Incidentally, if you notice some shows are missing, you're right. Show 4 is missing as that was a Duran Duran show which had the wrong date on it - and then I worked on it a second time as I wasn't happy with the first one - it reappeared as Show 12. Also Show 14 was an Erasure show which someone who said he worked for Vince Clarke's management, didn't want to be made available - although he made sure he recorded the broadcast for himself, as I remember! Anyway, although his emails were a bit dubious to say the least, we erred on the side of caution and the Erasure show is no longer available.